Hackathon How I Did It - Shanda Innovations

We are a team focused on data mining from Shanda Innovations, a tech incubator of Shanda Corporation from China. It’s a global leading interactive entertainment media group . We all graduated from top tier universities in China, majored in Computer Science, and then started our career in Chinese IT companies. Right before the EMI Competition, we was awarded second place in ACM KDD-Cup 2012.

Was your strategy any different for competing in a 24-hour hackathon vs. the longer running KDD cup? Any advice for future hackathon participants on how to win the 'sprint' rather than the 'marathon'?

Our strategy for the longer running KDD-Cup and the 24-hour hackathon was very different. The 24 hour hackathon is a very intensive competition, so that what the participants need to do is to find the key features in a much faster way. This means the participants need to take simpler and more effective methods for preprocessing and post-processing. The hackathon is more demanding with getting quick reaction and making the right priorities. Given a chance, we will give the above advice for future participants.

The KDD-Cup lasting for several months is more demanding with the continuous concentration as well as better endurance of participants. Better skills in time management skill as well as project management are also necessary in this longer competition. Last but not least, participants also need to take care of each other’s motivation for people tend to lose their eagerness to participate when the time goes by and it is hard to always keep a strong motivation.

What made you decide to enter?

We would love to put ourselves on the international stage and to compete as well as to share our knowledge of data mining with peers from all over the world. We believe participating in this competition would be a precious opportunity to “meet” all the talents in this field. In addition, the competition was very exciting and challenging. Given a tight time constraint of the competition, we viewed it as a chance for overnight team building.

What preprocessing and machine learning methods did you use?

Some preprocessing was given to Words.txt. We mapped the words that users chose to describe artists to some keyword IDs and used these IDs in the logistic regression model, which greatly improved the performance.

The main machine learning methods were SVD++ and Logistic Regression.

What was your most important insight into the data?

For most users the training data was very sparse. Therefore, we should integrate more features from other aspects. For instance, the user profiles, words they chose, and survey results would be very valuable.

Sometimes it is easy for us to trap in a fixed mindset and may ignore some potential important indicators. Keeping our mind open is easier said than done.

Were you surprised by any of your insights?

We were very surprised to find that the variation of the track scores given by different people was a lot more than we expected. For instance, User ID 41072 scored 100 to track 156 whereas User ID 41286 gave merely 4 to the same track! It was very interesting to find that people were so different in music preference and we believed that was why so many different types of music existed. By making a further in-depth data analysis we may discover more on the music interests of people.

Which tools and programming language did you use?

The programming languages include C++ and Python. We would like to express our gratitude to APEX team, the author of an open source toolkit called SVDFeature used in our solution.

What have you taken away from this competition?

We had a lot of fun and our team became more united . What is more important is that we came to think about a broader area of data mining application. It is interesting to see our technology being used in other industries, for example the music and entertainment industry this time. This is an eye-opening experience that brought a lot of sparkles to our routine work.